In the News 09.21.18 : Today’s Articles of Interest from Around the Internets

Everything You Know
About Obesity Is Wrong

Seat belts were invented long before the automobile but weren’t mandatory in cars until the 1960s. The first confirmed death from asbestos exposure was recorded in 1906, but the U.S. didn’t start banning the chemical until 1973. Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

The Deliberate Awfulness Of Social Media

Twitter, as everyone knows, is Hell. Its most hellish aspect is a twofold, self-reinforcing contradiction: you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not. (Its pleasures, in this sense, are largely masochistic.) My relationship with the Web site, which has, for years now, been the platform most deeply embedded in my daily—hourly, minutely—routine, has come to feel increasingly perverse. It mostly seems to offer a relentless confirmation that everything is both as awful as possible and somehow getting worse. And everyone else on Twitter appears to feel the same way. (You can check this claim right now by doing a Twitter search for phrases including “extremely normal website” and “I’m losing my mind.”) Last month, the writer Julius Sharpe posted the following exquisitely relatable sentiment: “Whenever someone stops tweeting, I feel like Ben Affleck going to Matt Damon’s house at the end of ‘Good Will Hunting.’ So happy for them.”

So why hasn’t Sharpe done a runner, like Matt Damon lighting out for the territory? And why, more to the point, haven’t I? The obvious answer is that social media is an addiction. The first argument in Jaron Lanier’s recent book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” is that the nexus of consumer technologies and submerged algorithms, which forms so large a part of contemporary reality, is deliberately engineered to get us hooked. “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know,” he writes. “We’re all lab animals now.”

Chevy Chase Can’t Change

Chevy Chase is sitting on the porch, outside his home in wooded Westchester County. He takes a drag off a Marlboro and casually mentions that he ran into Donald Glover backstage at “Saturday Night Live.”

This is striking on multiple levels. Chase, one of SNL’s founding fathers, last appeared on the show for its 40th anniversary special in 2015. It wasn’t pretty. He was bursting out of his tux, drinking too much and depressed. A cloudy, backstage interview with Carson Daly led Defamer to ask, “Is Chevy Chase okay?”

These days, Chase is sober and about 40 pounds lighter. But he hasn’t softened up, and he wasn’t about to avoid Glover, even after what the “Atlanta” star said about him.

Twelve years ago, Amber Wyatt reported her rape. Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.

What Do We Owe Her Now?

Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.

I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.

Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.

The Untold Stories Of Paul McCartney

He’s as famous and accomplished as a man can be. He could just stay home, relax, and count his money. But Paul McCartney is as driven as ever. Which is why he’s still making music and why he has loads of great stories you’ve never heard—about the sex life of the Beatles, how he talked John Lennon out of drilling holes in his head (really), and what actually happened when he worked with Kanye.

If it’s your own history, you might as well use it. In August 1969, during a brief break from one of their final recording sessions, the four members of the Beatles were photographed in mid-stride on the London crosswalk a few yards from where they were working.1 The studio, the street, and the album whose cover this image would appear on, all share the same name: Abbey Road.

1. In the photo used on the Abbey Road sleeve, Paul McCartney is out of stride with the other three Beatles, and is also the only Beatle barefoot. These chance details would later be taken as principal pieces of “evidence” for a conspiracy theory that still inspires a significant literature to this day: that in late 1966 the real McCartney had died in an accident and that at the time of this photo he had been replaced by an impostor who has played the role of “Paul McCartney” ever since. (He didn’t; he hadn’t.)